Eduardo Toledo 3

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Exam Paper

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Question 2
During the 19
th
century in America, many people and groups of people had their civil, social,
political and even human rights taken away. In this essay, I will describe the life of 3 specific people, and
what they had to go through to change or survive those conditions.
The first person Id like to talk about is Henry Box Brown. He was born a slave in a plantation
in Virginia in 1815. When he was fifteen, the death of his master broke up his family, he and his sister
Martha were sold to a slave owner in Richmond, Virginia who had a tobacco factory. He writes in a letter
how he hasnt heard from his mother in years, and how he missed having a family.
Richmond gave him a clear view of the increasingly turbulent and contradictory world of
American slavery. He became a respected member of the community and ended up marrying another
slave, Nancy, and had three children. At first, he thought he could try to preserve an ordinary life and
keep his family together. However, in 1849, he discovered how little control he had over his life when
his master sold his wife and children away from him.
With his family split up and his life in shambles, there was nothing left tying him to slavery. So
with the help of a few friends, he arranged to have himself mailed to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. In
addition to planning and executing the most famous escape in history of American slavery, Brown was a
gifted self-promoter and entrepreneur. He claimed the name Box and published his narrative, gave
speeches, reenacted his escape, and displayed a giant painted canvas panorama called The mirror of
slavery, which told American history from a black perspective. Brown became a very accomplished
showman, which led to criticism from antislavery activists for putting his commercial interests ahead of
the abolitionist movement. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, he flew England, after he
Eduardo Toledo 3
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Exam Paper

His 106 12/12/11

was almost captured in Rhode Island by bounty hunters, and had a brief but successful career as an
antislavery entertainer by singing, lecturing, selling lithographs of himself, and even having himself
shipped in a box from Bradford to Leeds.
The second person Id like to describe is Frederick Douglass. Born Frederick Washington Bailey,
in 1818 in Maryland, he was the son of a white man and a black slave. He was taken away from his
mother early in his life and since then he passed from master to master. When he was twelve, Douglass
was taught how to read by his masters wife, an act that was prohibited by law at that time. As a
teenager, he taught fellow slaves to read in Sunday school, and organized many failed attempts of mass
escapes, until he finally succeeded on his own when he was nineteen, disguised as a free black sailor. He
changed his name to Frederick Douglass and married Anna Murray, moved to New Bedford,
Massachusetts , and joined the American Anti-Slave Society. He became a leader of the abolitionist
movement, and gained note for his dazzling oratorical skills and incisive antislavery writing, and even
published his auto biography, which became an international best seller. He edit his own antislavery
paper, The North Star, and served as an adviser to Abraham Lincoln during the war. He also became
the president of the Freedmans Savings and trust company during the Reconstruction. He was a firm
believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant,
famously quoted as saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
The third person Id like to describe is John Brown. He was born in Torrington, Connecticut, in
1800, and was a revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed
insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. In October 1859, when he was 59 years
old, the white abolitionist, tanner, farmer, and failed business man launched the ultimate battle in his
war against slavery. With five black and sixteen white followers, which two of them were his sons, he
captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, a town still in Virginia, about sixty miles northwest of
Eduardo Toledo 3
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Washington D.C., at the meeting point of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Assuming that slaves use
arms from the arsenal to rise up an claim their freedom, he planned to set off a spreading slave rebellion
that made use of weapons from other arsenals. Strongly committed to a Christianity tooted in the Old
Testament, Brown had begun his campaign of armed slaves in Kansas. In 1854, Senator Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois introduced the proposal of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which increased the division
between the defenders and the opponents of slavery. The Act created two different territories, and
allowed the inhabitants of each side to decide whether they wanted to allow or prohibit slavery. Soon
after the passage of the bill, pro-slavery migrants from Missouri and antislavery partisans from the
North were settling in Kansas, aiming to determine the future of that territory.
In Kansas, Brown and several of his son participated n the guerilla warfare over whether the
territory would become a slave state or a free state. Browns murder of five men at the Pottawatomie
Creek in retaliation for the killing of an anti-slavery partisan increased the violence in that territory in
the mid 1850s. Later, while living in the black community in North Elba, NY, he planned the Harpers
Ferry attack. After thirty six hours, federal troops led by Robert E. Lee caught Brown and his remaining
men at Harpers Ferry. He was hanged in December of 1859. Even though he was killed, Browns memory
became an object of Southern rage. Northern abolitionists adapted a song about a young soldier in the
Massachusetts Volunteer Militia who shared Browns name to use as their anthem.